


CAROLUS REX

by ohwhatevers



Series: eightfitzweek2017 [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: (for a bit), Interrogation, Jealousy, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Rebellion, Separations, Theatre, eightfitzweek2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-05 06:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11571903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohwhatevers/pseuds/ohwhatevers
Summary: "Sudden raised voices drifted through the wall behind the Doctor. He twisted around, one of them had sounded like Fitz.The officer grimaced again. “My colleague has a temper glitch. He has a ‘bad cop’ subroutine.”The fact that this was her equivalent of a joke did not comfort the Doctor in the least."The Doctor and Fitz get arrested and separated for questioning after they get involved in the drop for a seditious theatre group......this isn't sad, was it meant to be?





	CAROLUS REX

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta-read, so all mistakes and bad writing are mine.  
> Charles III is a play by Mike Bartlett, but the plot of that has nothing to do with the plot of this.

Fitz had been in the small interrogation room for a while now. He drummed his hands against the table top and listened to the clink of the handcuffs on the metal loop they were locked to. He had been left in a bare grey cell of a room, facing an empty chair and a large mirror covering most of the wall. Fitz wasn’t impressed – he could see the blurry silhouettes of people moving behind the two-way mirror.

When he was first forced in the chair, he had fretted and worried but now he was just bored. The waiting seemed a bit unnecessary, Fitz thought, his captors could surely see it wasn’t intimidating him. Admittedly, Fitz was concerned about the Doctor – he had been struck unconscious quite hard during their arrest earlier. The fact Fitz didn’t know where the Doctor was or _how_ he was troubled him.  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The professor stood up and turned on some more lamps. Evening had fell while he and the Doctor talked and they hadn’t noticed until the room was encroached by shadows. The darkness outside the little room made it feel smaller and the warm light from the lamps only made the contrast between inside and the blackness outside more pronounced.

Fitz blinked and shuffled around in his armchair. He hadn’t really known what he was there for and so drank far too many brandies to cover his discomfort. He shook his head to clear it. Sounds of the professor’s study group drifted through the wall, laughter and loud voices and the cheerful of noise of no actual studying done at all.

Professor Villiers sat down again and rested his hand on the Doctor’s knee, picking up the thread pf their conversation about _‘The Critic as Artist’_ easily. Fitz glared at him over his glass. He hated this comfortable-looking professor and his cosy little flat and his comfortable group if students, and his uncomfortable ties with outlawed opposition groups. He hated him touching _his_ Doctor.

Fitz peered into his glass and put it down on the rickety coffee table. _That’s enough drinking for now_ , he thought. Fitz got up and left the room, passing the brightly lit kitchen to the bathroom. It was hidden in a cupboard with a door release button camouflaged in the replica wood door and Fitz was struck again by how seamlessly technology blended in with the flat’s décor – a décor that wouldn’t have been out of place in his time period.

The toilet was lit with soft blue light and a cool night draft came through the open window. Fitz sat down, rested his head on the sink. He watched the whitewashed panelling to see if it would talk to him – but no luck, not even inanimate objects wanted to talk to Fitz. He sighed. The panelling was uneven and one panel stuck out. Fitz frowned and knocked his boot against the stupid thing.

It popped open with a loud _click_. Fitz scrabbled his fingers around the edge until he got a grip on it, pulled it fully opened, and gaped.

The panelling disguised a compartment bristling full of weaponry. Fitz recognised the blunt-nosed blasters and chunky tasers used the police patrols he and the Doctor had seen, but there also larger guns he didn’t, and an alarming array of knives. Fitz moved a heavy machine gun to one side and saw, sitting pretty at the bottom, an unmarked jar of yellowish pills. He was painfully familiar with what _they_ were. Fitz slammed the compartment shut.

The warm brandy-haze was gone. The sooner Villiers handed over the chip and they were gone, the better. Far off, a siren wailed, the sound unchanged even here on the other side of the galaxy; the night chill was no longer peaceful. Fitz exited the bathroom only to bump into one of the students waiting in the hall. She smiled awkwardly at him, but saw his guilty backwards glance and grinned a shark-like grin. Fitz felt sick, remembering what Sam had told him about the Total Liberation Brigade. She couldn’t have been much older than twenty.

Back in the front room, the Doctor and another one of Villiers’ students were crowded by the window, peeking around the curtain to the street below. Villiers was in his armchair, something clenched tight in one hand, the other carefully flat and still on his knee.

“Are you sure you heard it?” he was saying as Fitz came in. “You have to be certain, Deven.”

Deven turned around, “We checked police server,” he said, “no patrol was authorised but a hovercraft is comin’.”

Villiers stood up and smoothed his jumper and trousers with short, brisk movements. “Take the others and go the back way. Message me when everyone is home safe.”

Deven started to object, arguing that a cache of weapons was useless if they never had the courage to use them. Villiers swore, saying that it wasn’t a question of courage, but a question not being a fucking idiot. Fitz agreed but didn’t say anything. A look of deep hurt crossed the student’s face and Villiers looked guiltily away.

The Doctor put a hand on Deven’s shoulder, “You need to go,” he said, “you’re needed to stage it, even if Fitz and I can’t get it out tonight.”

The Doctor looked over at Fitz, hovering in the doorway, as he said this. Fitz saw just how worried he was in the set of his mouth and pinched look around his eyes, but the student did not. He nodded, crossed over to Villiers, and kissed him softly before he left. Fitz remembered how Villiers looked at his Doctor and would have felt pity for him, had not sirens started wailing again.

They were close this time – and getting closer.  
\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
The Doctor blinked into consciousness and rubbed his pounding head, a lump had risen on the base of his skull and it throbbed gently. He lifted his head off the cool metal table top and sat up. He brought up short by the chain of hand cuffs keeping him in place. He shifted his chair closer to table so he could sit up properly. A quick look around the room confirmed they had been taken in for questioning, if no one believed they had useful information, they would have been carted off straight to the prison block. The Doctor winced and rubbed his head again, really there had been no need to knock him out just because he had done some questioning of his own as he and Fitz were bundled into the dark hovercraft.

A door in the blank wall opened with a hydraulic swoosh and an officer walked in. She was both austere and sloppy; her hair was scraped back in a tight bun and her face was mechanically blank, but her uniform was in disrepair, crumpled and hanging unevenly on her frame. She sat opposite the Doctor, put an electronic pad down in front of her, and grimaced. The Doctor thought perhaps she was attempting to smile so he smiled back. Her face dropped back into a mask.

“Under Section 28 of State Law 1757 concerning enemies of the state,” she began, “Professor Stanford Villiers is under surveillance.” She paused and fixed the Doctor with a beady glare. “You were seen at his at his personal address and apprehended leaving it.”

“Apprehended leaving?” the Doctor cried, “We were dragged from it!”

She appeared not to even realise he had spoken. “How do you know Professor Stanford Villiers?”

 

“I don’t” Fitz said, “my friend does, and I go where he goes.”

The robotic man opposite said nothing but wrote something on an electronic pad. His eyes glowed blue with the reflection from the pad, then changed to green. He looked up again.

“When were you first contacted by Stanford Villiers?”

“Not me. My friend knows him,” Fitz repeated. He felt a little twinge of shame that he was throwing the Doctor under the bus like this, but experience told him that if they were going to force it out of you anyway, you may as well just start with the truth. It made no difference in the long run and it didn’t save you any suffering, trying to lie under duress.

“Your _friend_ is the other man taken in with you, is he not?”

Fitz nodded and tried not to look too relieved at the mention of the Doctor. The Doctor was all right, he was fine…probably.

“What is his name?” The man pinned Fitz with his glassy staring eyes. Fitz was stumped. He drew a blank.

“He’s the, um, he’s…ah, John.” he grimaced, hoping he was convincing.

“No name given,” the man said, marking something on the pad. His eyes glowed red this time, and Fitz realised that it wasn’t the reflection from the screen, but his eyes themselves. They were some form of mechanical implant – or perhaps he was wholly android – it was hard to tell.

Fitz sweated and squirmed in his chair. _The Doctor better be having more luck_ , he thought grimly.

 

“What is your connection with the playwright, pseudonym of Charles the Third?”

“Oh, wasn’t it one of his plays broadcast in Cornwallis a couple of days ago? We caught the tail end of it before you started ‘clearing’ the square.”

Villiers was definitely getting careless if they suspected the Doctor knew Charles III after visiting him. The Doctor’s throat constricted and a wave of nausea swept over him. He gulped and drummed a little tune on the table. It sounded uncomfortably like _Another One Bites the Dust._

The officer’s android eyes watched and recorded his every move. It was the uniform that had clued the Doctor in that she was an AI. A human officer would be as meticulous in the appearance as their bedside manner, unlike the female figure questioning him. The Doctor thought she was a beautiful, clever thing and he would have liked to get to know her operating system better, but in another life where she wasn’t interrogating him.

“How do you know Charles III?” she asked.

The Doctor said he didn’t know him, never met him even.

“How do you know Charles III?” she repeated.

“I don’t!” the Doctor snapped, slapping his hands on the table.

The officer watched him for a while longer, then, suddenly, “You were apprehended with another unidentified citizen. Who is he?”

“Fitz Kreiner. He’s with me - my, um, plus one.” The Doctor was a little surprised by this change of tack but he saw the sense in it. He could be made it let something slip through talking about something different. “He’s my friend, my companion,” he finished awkwardly.

She said nothing, wrote on her pad, and waited. After a moment, her eyes flashed green.

Sudden raised voices drifted through the wall behind the Doctor. He twisted around, one of them had sounded like Fitz.

The officer grimaced again. “My colleague has a temper glitch. He has a ‘bad cop’ subroutine.”

The fact that this was her equivalent of a joke did not comfort the Doctor in the least.

 

“Where is your work permit?”

“My what?” Fitz asked.

“All those who trade must have a work permit – you do not. Where is your work permit?” His voice grew progressively louder and one eye glitched red, green, blue, and red again.

“I don’t _have_ one,” Fitz cried.

“You do not belong without a permit.” He stood up. Both his eyes glowed a fierce red now. “You do not belong.”

Fitz shrank back, looking around frantically. The two-way mirror was completely blank, reflecting only the man’s back and Fitz frightened face. Whoever was behind it had left and Fitz doubted they had gone to fetch help. With a short click and a snap, Fitz was unchained from the table and hauled to his feet. Fitz braced himself and shut his eyes.

“Who is Charles III? Who is Charles III?” the man shouted repeatedly into Fitz’s face. All Fitz could do was mutely shake his head.

The man swung back and punched Fitz, hard, in the ribs. Fitz doubled over, wheezing. He swung again and Fitz whined in pain. The third blow was different. A sharp shock ran through Fitz, jerking his body about and rattling his bones. When it subsided, Fitz retched his guts out, heaving painfully. Two short metal prongs had extended from the man’s knuckles and a crackle of electricity played across them. Fitz swore and spat. Of _fucking_ course. Built in tasers, spring them on you when you least expect it, _how clever_. Fitz tried to dodge the next swing but it got him in the chest – and the man held his fist there.

Fitz screamed. For an eternity, the electricity coursed through him, scorching every inch of his nerves. He fell motionless to the floor.

The man dropped his fists. He crouched down to examine Fitz, and the lights blew. The room was deathly quiet. The only light came from the red emergency lights, which threw deep, hellish shadows across the man’s face. He lifted his skull-like head to peer into the security camera in the corner.

The door burst open and two masked in black people rushed in. The one in the vanguard fired a blaster and the man’s head exploded in a shower of circuitry. He crumpled.

“How is he?” the taller one asked, standing over her friend as she Fitz’s still body.

“He’ll be all right, duck,” she replied, putting a small scanner away in her gear. “Ayup, duck, let’s get gone,” she said to the unconscious Fitz. “How’s Maddie doing?”

The tall one checked her communicator on her wrist, “Cameras are still out, and she’s got the Doctor out.”

The short one nodded, and hefted Fitz up. She slung him over her shoulder, her little stature belying her strength, and she manoeuvred them out of the door after her friend.

“All clear.”

“Think they’ve still got it, duckie?”

“They better.”

They disappeared down the corridor.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
Fitz came around on the floor. This did not surprise him but the fact he was on a mattress did. The Doctor was curled up next to him, holding his hand, and doing a pretty poor job of pretending to be asleep. Fitz reached out an aching hand to brush the Doctor’s curls out of his eyes. The Doctor smiled, eyes still stubbornly shut.

“Doctor, hey… _Doctor_ , where are we?” Fitz whispered, nudging the Doctor.

“With the stage crew,” the Doctor whispered back, pulling Fitz closer and cuddling him tight.

“Oh,” said Fitz, and tucked his chin on top of the Doctor’s head, “you still had then?”

The Doctor nodded, Fitz felt it against his neck, “I swallowed it before I went after you.”

Fitz remembered dashing out of Villiers’ front room, running in a panic towards the bathroom, forgetting what he had thought of Deven’s suggestion of using the weapons cache, as the sounds of the patrol squad grew louder and the thuds of their battering ram shook the front door on its hinges.

“I’m sorry, Doctor.” He had turned back as the door had finally given out and he heard the Doctor being dragged away. That hadn’t been thought through either.

“Doesn’t matter now,” the Doctor told him.

Fitz was safe. Outside, the state authorities would now be searching for him and the Doctor, and their only protection was a ragtag collation of opposition groups and the confidence of an old literature professor, but here, with the Doctor, he felt as safe as houses.

Fitz laughed, “Carolus Rex,” he said, and curled around the Doctor. He felt the Doctor’s smile and soft kiss warm him deep inside as he drifted back to sleep.

_Carolus Rex,_ indeed.


End file.
